Baby Vapes
A viral image causes consternation among a vocal handful of vapers.
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by Dave Cross
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Just before the August Bank Holiday weekend, a Twitter account using the name adam.the.creator @AdamPadilla published an image depicting a baby sucking on “my first vape ™”. By the end of the holiday period it had only amassed 163 retweets and 213 likes. The tweet also drew some very abusive replies from vapers and allegations that he was put up to it by a pharmaceutical company.
Adam Padilla owns and runs BrandFire, a social-first creative agency: “We bring a new way of thinking about brands and content – putting consumers and the culture they live in at the forefront. We know what the internet is buzzing about at any given moment, and use this intel to build brands and social-driven campaigns as fresh as the world we live in.”
Adam’s social media accounts are where he displays his independent meme work and ideas. This is where angry vapers stumbled across his graphic featuring a baby.
“A graphic designer with the brain capacity of a goldfish..... and you earn a living from this? This is prime ammo for anti-vaping lobbyists,” exclaimed “Keef VTTV”.
“Very irresponsible,” said vaping v1ck.
“Absolute garbage,” added Shawn Hoefer.
Others called Adam a c-word, an f-word “douchebag moron”, and an “utter cretin”. It was far from vaping’s greatest moment.
Why were these people so vexed? Apparently, they believe Adam took money from Pfizer in order to place vaping in a bad light.
Dead Vape Shop asked: “Did Pfizer pay you to make this?”
John enquired: “How is that Pfizer money treating you?”
And a darren stone posed: “How much did a major pharmaceutical company pay you to smear vaping?”
How did the creator respond?
“I'm a satirist, and it's funny. If you don't think so, that's your opinion. No need to be insulting,” Adam replied to one post. Then, in response to the allegations this was anything more than a simple act of creativity to produce a meme, he added: “Wrong, but amusing theory. Wow vape fans are really humorless. I thought you guys were supposed to be cool and interesting.”
If the angry vapers had scrolled through his media feed, or looked at the banner image, they will have seen this was nothing more than an exploration of the viral nature of images.
Previously, Adam has been responsible for some incredibly witty content – one of which is the “Happy Hour” bar for toddlers. “In December 2016, we set out to create a piece of content that would leverage Instagram and the power of memes to go viral. With billions of pieces of content populating social news-feeds, it would take something truly disruptive to get peoples’ attention.”
Happy Hour achieved over one billion hits across various social media outlets and was featured on a number of news programs. Adam’s company will be disappointed that vaping doesn’t cause anywhere near as much interest from the general public, but will have unfortunately noted that some vapers are very quick to be defensive and abusive online.
He has also produced images depicting Olive Garden flavoured Starburst packets, an Apple spinner, Starbucks laced with codeine, Oreos just made from the filling only, and a wicked takedown of United Airlines.
While some may judge the online vapers of being too quick to react and lacking a sense of humour, do you believe this could reflect badly on vaping? What impact do you seriously feel this image could have on future legislation? Were people right to be angry?
Photo Credit:
Images: https://twitter.com/AdamPadilla and BrandFire
Dave Cross
Journalist at POTVDave is a freelance writer; with articles on music, motorbikes, football, pop-science, vaping and tobacco harm reduction in Sounds, Melody Maker, UBG, AWoL, Bike, When Saturday Comes, Vape News Magazine, and syndicated across the Johnston Press group. He was published in an anthology of “Greatest Football Writing”, but still believes this was a mistake. Dave contributes sketches to comedy shows and used to co-host a radio sketch show. He’s worked with numerous start-ups to develop content for their websites.
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